The Unauthorised Biography
by Refur
Summary: A series of vignettes of life in the Winchester world. Number two: John's life is perfect. He's happy. Really, he is.
1. Magic

Supernatural is not mine.

So, this is kind of an experiment: back in my first fandom, _seaQuest DSV_, I wrote a series of ficlets based on Ben Folds songs. And I figure, if an idea's worth using once, it's worth using again, right? So here's the first installment in what I hope will become a series. Lyrics to the first verse are given at the beginning, and to the whole song at the end.

**---- **

**Magic**

_From the back of your big brown eyes  
I knew you'd be gone as soon as you could  
And I hoped you would._

_We could see that you weren't yourself  
And the lines on your face did tell it's just as well,  
You'd never be yourself again._

It was quiet, after. Maybe quieter than it had ever been, even in those long weeks that Dean barely remembered when Mom was newly gone and had taken all Dean's words with her. It felt the same, this time, Dean's words were gone again, except this time there was no Sam to fill in the silences with his need. Sam had taken Dean's words, and he didn't even have the common decency to stay and make up for the loss.

The quiet stretched out into months, a new motel, a new hunt (_no rented apartments now, not any more_), and Dean carried on, got up in the morning, made the coffee run, flirted with waitresses, made a wisecrack now and then (but less and less often, because Dad didn't even seem to hear them). It was life; life had to go on. And if he was angry, well, Dad didn't need to know that. Dad had enough anger of his own to deal with.

----

Somewhere in Nevada, there was a diner with dirt ground into the cracks on the Formica table-tops and a floor sticky with something that Dean didn't even want to think about, and California was only a few hundred miles away. Dad sat across from Dean and scribbled furiously in his journal, and Dean waited, sitting right over against the window as if he was leaving space for someone else on the seat beside him. Once upon a time, Sam had told him that a triangle was the strongest shape; Dean knew now that that was God's honest truth.

"We could go," he said, and Dad stopped writing, paused in mid-word, but didn't look up. He didn't ask where.

"We could go get him, Dad," Dean said again, not liking the note of pleading that had crept into his voice, but not able to do anything about it.

The silence stretched out for a long moment, and Dean held his breath. Then the scratching of the pen resumed. "Your brother's made his choice."

----

That was what he said, but John Winchester and the truth weren't exactly on the best of terms, and so it was no great surprise to Dean when he woke hours later to see a sign proclaiming that they were entering California. He didn't mention it; what was there to say?

----

In his mind, Dean had imagined that they would find Sam and tell him it was time to come home now, and he would acknowledge that, he would see that he had been wrong all this time. In his mind, Sam had been unhappy, had been staying away only through stubbornness. In his mind, he had forgotten the way that Sam used to look, years before, when he was happy. Forgotten it, or buried it so deep that when he saw the gangly, awkward figure crossing the street, he almost didn't recognise him.

He heard Dad exhale next to him, and it wasn't anger, now, it was surprise, and Dean wondered if he was seeing it too. Before he left, Sam's shoulders had been hunched as if he was constantly walking in an icy wind, his face pale and pinched, his mouth turned down at the corners even in sleep. This man here, this man with his broad smile, the flash of teeth as he laughed at something his companion said, head thrown back, like it was the funniest thing he'd ever heard, like he wasn't afraid to just let go – this man was not their Sam.

But when Dean thought about it, when he counted up the memories one by one like grains of sand, he began to think that maybe, maybe the boy they'd been living with, the one who had fought and brooded and then turned around and left, maybe that boy was the one who wasn't their Sam. Because looking at him now, as he walked away, easy and comfortable in his stride, Dean remembered a Sam who'd looked like that, once.

Later, Dean remembered something else: he remembered the way that, when the storm had come crashing down, when angry words had dropped like acid from Sam's lips and from Dad's, the first thought that had crossed his mind was _I knew this was coming_.

----

Somewhere in Arizona, there was a motel with cockroaches in the bathroom and grime so thick on the windows you could write your name in it, and California was as far away as the moon. Dad was rustling papers at the little table, frowning in concentration, and Dean lay on the bed furthest from the door, right up against the edge, as if he needed to leave space for someone. A triangle was the strongest shape, but maybe there was more to life than strength, and Sam had made his choice.

It was quiet, maybe quieter than it had ever been, but when Dean closed his eyes, he could hear Sam laughing.

_From the back of your big brown eyes  
I knew you'd be gone as soon as you could  
And I hoped you would._

_We could see that you weren't yourself  
And the lines on your face did tell it's just as well,  
You'd never be yourself again._

_Saw you last night dance by the light of the moon,  
Stars in your eyes, free from the life that you knew.  
_

_You're the magic that holds the sky up from the ground,  
You're the breath that blows these cool winds round,  
Trading places with an angel now.  
_

_Saw you last night dance by the light of the moon,  
Stars in your eyes, free from the life that you knew.  
Saw you last night, stars in the skies smiled in my room._


	2. Missing the War

Supernatural isn't mine.

Fic number three in the crazy week o' fic, and also number two in the Unauthorised Biography series. Many thanks to Silwyna, JazzyIrish, Nana56, MistyEyes, Luxorien, mtee1958, rozzy07, Harrigan and BeanButterfly for their reviews on the first one, and to everyone who's been reading and reviewing my output in general these week. So, you guys sick of me yet? ;)**  
**

**----**

**Missing the War**

_All is quiet, his tired eyes  
See figures jotted down  
And clothes all strewn around the bedroom floor._

_Now nothing's adding up and nothing's making sense.  
She's sleeping like a baby,  
She doesn't know he wasn't meant for this._

_I'm missing the war,  
I'm missing the war all night,  
Missing the war,  
I'm missing the war._

The thing John remembered most about it was the heat. Days spent lying in the dirt, slogging through swamps, and the sweat dripping in his eyes, no way it could do its job and cool his skin by evaporating because the air was so full of moisture it was like walking under water. In later years, when life took him far from Kansas, he would catch echoes of that heat in Florida, in Georgia and Louisiana, and he would crank up the A/C in the car and try not to remember, but in 1978, when all he had experienced of life was the Midwest and Indochina, the memory of the heat was like a weight that pressed down late at night, until even the sleeping warmth of Mary's body became too much for him, even the brush of her skin against his burned.

He had a life, though, now. Had a wife and a good job, was his own boss, even, and here was life the way it was meant to be lived, a white-painted house, neighbours who know your name, respect and respectability. There was no more need to crawl through filth, to watch for the slightest movement that might signal death for himself or his unit, to hear the rumble of gunfire close and distant, smell the stench of charred flesh. Those things were behind him, and he was happy, how could he not be?

And then, and then, there were times when he would look up from a car he was working on and see his life stretching ahead of him with _no aim_, nothing but just more _life_. It was good life, sure, but the sheer _amount_ of it made John feel lost, and there was no-one to tell him the objective any more, the only objective was to _live_, and there was nothing noble in that, nothing John could salvage to make himself feel like there was purpose.

One of John's old buddies lived a few towns over, and they met up for beers whenever they could. Markham, his name was, John as well, not that they ever called each other by their first names (_too confusing_, John thought, but what he meant was _we're not civilians, not really_). They talked about old times and new ones; Markham had a girl, Josephine, and a kid, too, even a goddamn _dog_, a perfect life, just like John's. They would sit on his front porch on warm nights and shoot the breeze about old friends and places they'd been, but they never talked about the heat, they never talked about the way the steam would rise from the broad waxy leaves of the jungle trees.

Markham wasn't John's only friend; hell, John had a whole parcel of them back in Lawrence, guys with nine-to-five jobs and wives who wore light floral dresses in summer and had no hardness to their faces. But when Markham leaned back and stretched out his long legs one night in April and said _sometimes I think life was easier, then_, John forgot the whistling noise that napalm makes as it falls through the air, forgot the way it feels to kill another human being who's standing so close that you can see the light go out in their eyes, and remembered the relief of knowing _why_, maybe not the why of everything (because Christ knew, nobody seemed to be able to figure that one out even now), but the why of right here and right now, of getting through the day, of doing what you were ordered to save your own life and your unit's. He remembered, and he thought maybe he agreed.

Mary didn't understand, but how could she? She was like a ray of light in the stormy sky of John's world: perfect, beautiful, but so far above everything that she couldn't even see what she was illuminating, too bright to see the darkness that surrounded her. John clung to her like a drowning man, but she didn't see _why_ he needed to hold fast, couldn't see the cracks that ran through the picket fence and the Sunday pot-lucks and paying the neighbourhood kids fifty cents to wash the car. Sometimes he held so tight that she pushed him away, and sometimes he found himself screaming at her for no reason other than that she represented _this_, that she was its blameless avatar, that she knew how to be the person she was and she made it look like it wasn't even difficult.

And Markham would cluck and sigh and get John another beer and say _she doesn't understand_, even though John had barely said a word about it, and John would think _no, she doesn't_, and he couldn't help but be glad, because if she _did_ understand then she would be stained, like he was, like Markham was, and he didn't want that for her, he needed her to be blemish-free so that she could keep him from sinking without a trace.

In May, almost June, when it was so unseasonably hot that John thought he might suffocate (_but it was dry heat_), and gunfire had been ringing in his ears for days, Mary bit her lip and said _I'm pregnant_, and there was apprehension in her eyes.

And when John laid his hand on her belly and imagined that in there was a child, something he and Mary had created together, he felt his life stretching out before him and he thought _maybe I can do this_.

_Missing the War_

_All is quiet, his tired eyes  
See figures jotted down  
And clothes all strewn around the bedroom floor._

_  
Now nothing's adding up and nothing's making sense.  
She's sleeping like a baby,  
She doesn't know he wasn't meant for this._

_I'm missing the war,  
I'm missing the war all night,  
Missing the war,  
I'm missing the war._

_He drove home again, pissed and beaten.  
It's really no big deal,  
It happens all the time,  
It's no big deal._

_I'm missing the war,  
I'm missing the war all night,  
Missing the war,  
I'm missing the war  
Till beads of sunlight hit me in the morning._

_So much time so little to say._

_Time may fly and dreams may die,  
The shaking voice that tells him go  
Still thinks he might, he knows he won't._

_I'm missing the war,  
I'm missing the war all night,  
Missing the war,  
I'm missing the war._

_--Ben Folds Five, Whatever and Ever Amen._


End file.
